


Navy Cross

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Feels, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Presumed Dead (kinda), extremely sketchy science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 01:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11326215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Jack gets a taste of real heroism. It's not all it's cracked up to be.





	Navy Cross

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally started for an SSR Confidential treat (inspired by the "Radiation" prompt on my genprompt_bingo card), but quickly grew out of control.
> 
> I should reassure readers that there is no actual character death in this fic, no matter how it looks at times. Contains mention of gruesome medical details, references to vomiting, etc, but nothing disgusting actually happens on the page, so to speak, and generally not to characters in the story.

**1952 - SHIELD hazardous materials research lab, rural Nevada**

 

_Here's what you get for being a fake hero:_

_Fame. Acclaim. Your dad slapping you on the back with undisguised pride gleaming in his eyes. A job running America's top covert intelligence agency. A fucking Navy Cross._

_And here's what you get for being a real hero:_

_A gruesome, slow death._

_The world ain't fair. Only children and fools expect it to be._

***

Peggy was pacing again.

"Knock it off," Jack told her. He was sitting on the edge of his hospital bed, not in it, after another seemingly endless examination in which SHIELD's medical team had stuck him like a pincushion for blood draws. In the twelve or so hours since the accident, the initial nausea and weakness had passed and he now felt basically okay. In a way, that was the worst part, because they'd explained to him that he _would_ feel okay, right up until his immune system collapsed and his organs started to liquify.

Dying of radiation poisoning was a hell of a good time.

"There has to be _something."_ Peggy was nibbling at the edge of her nail again. Noticing, she made herself stop. "Howard and Jason are working around the clock in the lab, trying to find a way to reverse the effects of acute radiation exposure. There's also some promising research that's been done over the last few years in California --"

"Look, you and I both know nobody's ever taken this much radiation and lived," Jack said, and then wished he hadn't, because of the look on Peggy's face. Well, it wasn't like trying to hide from the facts would make the situation go away. He'd done enough of that over the course of his life. 

Before yesterday he wouldn't have known a rad from a roentgen, but he'd been getting a crash course from stacks of files couriered in from SHIELD, the old SSR archives, and Los Alamos. 

And if he _had_ known, would it have changed anything? He liked to think it wouldn't have, and honestly, it wasn't as if he'd stopped to think anyway before he'd gone on autopilot and lunged across the hangar to stick his hand into that lurid blue-violet glow.

It was a stupid, freak accident. (Story of their lives.) SHIELD's Nevada lab had been open for about a year and a half, located in a patch of remote desert where experiments could be conducted that were deemed too hazardous to be carried out closer to civilization -- say, at the main lab in New York. The Nevada facility now handled the storage of confiscated HYDRA tech from the war, as well as some of Stark's more dangerous inventions.

Atomic energy was one of their areas of study. Peggy had made it clear in no uncertain terms that she wasn't going to allow nuclear weapons to be built on SHIELD property, but the Nevada lab, where Stark was currently spending most of his time -- because nothing held Howard Stark's attention like a dangerous experiment -- had a contract with the U.S. government to develop safe, cheap nuclear power. Their current area of focus was a nuclear-powered engine that could be used in subs, aircraft carriers, and the like.

The bills had to be paid, after all, and Jack was actually one of the people who'd helped get them that contract in the first place.

_Let's drink a round for irony, shall we?_

Of course, Stark being Stark, he was combining that experiment with his latest crazy idea, trying to build a sort of flying aircraft carrier with a nuclear engine that could stay up in the air for years without ever coming down. Sounded nuts to Jack, but he didn't mind spending a couple hours with Peggy, wandering around the hangar where all of this was going on, letting Stark show off all the features of his latest project, with the promise of drinks by the pool afterwards. (Trust Stark to build a lab in the middle of the desert that had its own pool. And also a pretty nice attached set of living quarters, as Jack was now getting a chance to appreciate.)

So all of that had been going fine, right up to the point where an inexperienced lab tech had pushed the wrong button, the experimental reactor had almost gone critical, and Jack, because he was a fucking _idiot_ but also the only person who was anywhere close to it, had flung himself on the thing and physically pulled a handful of radioactive rods out of the chamber. He didn't know anything at all about nuclear reactions, but when Howard Stark was screaming "Separate it! Get the rods out of there!" from the far end of the hangar, there wasn't really much else to be done.

And that was how he'd ended up holding a handful of nuclear rods and looking down at it and thinking _Shit._

His hand still hurt. He flexed it, looking down at the bandaged palm. It didn't feel any worse than a mild burn. He tried not to think about the fact that most of the damage was inside, delicate tissues throughout his body seared by radiation, even now a ticking time bomb inside his body, likely to go off in the next few days and take him down with it -- 

Okay. Enough of that. He pushed himself off the hospital bed and stood up.

"Jack --" Peggy began.

"There's no point in me being in here, right? Everyone keeps saying there's nothing they can do for me, so I might as well have nothing done for me somewhere more comfortable."

***

Peggy walked across the compound with him, through the pitiless desert sun, to Jack's suite in the facility's residential complex. He didn't quite know a way to get rid of her. There wasn't much for her to do here; by all rights she should've been headed back to SHIELD HQ in New York already. He'd already tried to get her to leave a couple of times, but Peggy was like a brick wall of polite British obstinacy when she dug her heels in. She'd honed her stonewalling skills dealing with the U.S. government bureaucracy, and at this point, protests and attempts to change her mind just slid right off her.

"You probably shouldn't be spending this much time with me, as much radiation as I was exposed to."

Peggy, in typical Peggy fashion, shrugged off his concerns. "They said it's fine; I was exposed to a greater dosage back at the lab than I'll get from contact with you. Unless you plan on a great deal of skin-to-skin contact."

Jack snorted. "Yeah, and get punched in the nose by Sousa in addition to all my other troubles. No thanks."

"Speaking of Daniel, I forgot to tell you," Peggy said as she shut the door on the morning desert sun, already hot enough that the air-conditioned cool of Jack's suite felt refreshing. "He's flying in this evening."

"Oh, for God's sake, _why?"_ Peggy hovering, he could just about deal with. At least she wasn't touchy-feely about it. Having two of them underfoot was going to be hell.

And there was also, dancing around the back of his mind, the bitter awareness that his death was going to be both unpleasant and embarrassing. He didn't want them to remember him like that.

"He's top SHIELD brass, as are you," Peggy said briskly. "It only makes sense to have us all in one place given ... circumstances."

"So we can compare notes before my impending demise?" Jack said in a nasty tone. "Sure, that's a fine idea. Let's invite the whole board of directors while we're at it."

He didn't look at her, not wanting to see if he'd landed a hit. He _wanted_ to hurt her, wanted to chase her off, and he had a feeling it was going to be even worse with Daniel, who brought out his argumentative side at the best of times. Jack marched to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. One thing about any property managed by Howard Stark: it was going to have adequate supplies of booze.

"Are you supposed to be drinking?" Peggy asked. "Also, it's ..." She checked her watch. "Not quite eight in the morning."

"If I'm going to be dead in a week, I plan to be drunk for as much of it as possible."

"Pour me one as well, then."

He turned around to see her pick up a file from the table. There were stacks of them all over the place -- highly unsettling reading, most of them. The SHIELD medical staff had balked at letting Jack read case studies of other radiation poisoning victims, but he'd gotten unexpected backing from Peggy. She understood his need to inform himself about what was going to happen to him. In his place, she'd have done the same.

And it was just pure luck that she _hadn't_ been in his place -- that she'd been down at the other end of the hangar with Stark and the other scientists, while Jack, bored, had wandered off to get a better look at the disassembled parts of the flying aircraft carrier. Which was, in a way, lucky for everyone, since it had put him close enough to stop the chain reaction before it turned the entire facility into a fireball that could probably be seen as far away as Las Vegas. It just wasn't so lucky for _him._ He'd acted fast enough that everyone who wasn't terribly close to the reactor (which was to say, everyone except Jack) had been only lightly irradiated, not enough to cause any health problems according to the docs. 

Still, while he'd rather know what was going to happen to him than be caught unprepared, the files SHIELD had dug up weren't a comforting read. The two best-documented cases of acute radiation exposure were two scientists at Los Alamos back in the '40s, Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin, who had died in separate containment accidents during and just after the war. Their decline and highly unpleasant deaths had been recorded in detail, along with photos Jack really wished he hadn't looked at. Daghlian had taken 26 days to die; Slotin, exposed to considerably more radiation (the science guys figured about 1000 rads), had died in nine.

Which Jack only cared about because he was morbidly curious how _his_ dose compared. Stark thought he'd taken somewhere between 1200 and 1500 rads, which put him emphatically on the Slotin end of the continuum. All things considered, Jack figured he'd take it; from the reading he'd been doing, Daghlian's demise hadn't been any less miserable, it had just taken him a lot longer. A relatively fast, horrific death was better than a slow horrific death.

Not that a week of watching your own body disintegrate would be any fun at all. He'd actually kicked around the idea of sticking a gun in his mouth, but in order to do that, he would've had to get away from Peggy.

The unpleasant thought crossed his mind that maybe that was one reason why she was sticking so close to him. She'd always had an eerie ability to read him.

"How's everyone else doing?" he asked quietly as he poured a second glass. "Everyone who was in the hangar, I mean." _Including you._

"Fine, so far," she said somewhat absently, flipping a page from one stomach-turning photo to another. Jack had to look away. He'd thrown up a couple of times after the initial radiation exposure and then felt reasonably okay, but those pictures were making the booze in his otherwise empty stomach do back flips.

One of the things he'd learned from reading the files was that vomiting was a virtually universal reaction to severe radiation exposure, and the speed with which it came on was directly related to the amount of exposure -- virtually instantaneous, in Jack's case, which was literally about as bad as it could possibly have been. But then, that went along with the radiation dosage he'd received, which was enough to kill him several times over.

Okay, time for a change of topic. Well, sort of. At the present time, all topics inevitably circled around to one topic.

"We need to figure out how we're going to reallocate the division duties," he said, plunking down on the couch and taking the bottle of Scotch with him. "I can help you pick my successor."

"There's no need to do that now," Peggy demurred.

"When else?" Jack tilted his head and cut his eyes at the file in her hand. "Based on our light bedtime reading, in a day or two I'm going to have more distracting things to concentrate on than SHIELD's hiring-and-firing minutiae."

Peggy took a deep breath, gave him a sharp nod, and set the file back with the others, edges neatly squared. She sat on the end of the couch. "Who do you have in mind?"

***

It was evening, the slanting sunset light outside the window having given way to rapidly falling darkness, and they were still working on getting all of Jack's unofficial duties roughed out on paper (he'd always known the SHIELD high command was a clusterfuck, but this really brought home how much they needed more formal organization; SHIELD had started out as basically Peggy and her friends doing everything that needed doing, and in some ways it still was) when someone knocked on the door of the suite.

"Go away!" Jack yelled, because they'd already been visited every half hour, at least, by various scientists and medical personnel wanting to draw blood, collect urine samples, and measure his general radioactivity, such as it was.

"It's me," Daniel's voice called, and Peggy jumped to her feet as if at a gunshot and hurried to let him in.

"Hey," Daniel murmured, stroking the back of her hand lightly with his own as he came in, just a quick brush of his fingers. "Uh, Jack ... hey." His gaze went from Jack's face to his bandaged hand.

"Hey," Jack said flatly, trying to make it clear in both body language and expression that nothing remotely approaching questions after his health were going to be tolerated. Daniel opened his mouth and shut it again as Jack glared at him. An awkward silence descended.

Peggy cleared her throat. "We have food." She waved her hand to indicate the remains of a dinner they'd both been picking at, spread around among the file folders. Jack had been resolutely telling himself that the reason he wasn't hungry was because of nerves and the bottle of Scotch he'd been working on all day, and had nothing to do with any radiation related symptoms. He was managing to be at least partly successful as long as he didn't think about it too much.

"I ate on the flight. I ... uh ..." Daniel looked at Jack again. "I don't know a lot about what happened. Just what little I've been able to pick up. They said you threw yourself on a --"

"Don't want to talk about it," Jack interrupted.

Peggy cleared her throat again and took Daniel's hand. "Daniel, if you aren't too tired from the flight ... would you like to take a walk with me? Perhaps I could show you the grounds and we could chat for a bit."

"Yeah, don't mind the dying man!" Jack called after them. "Totally fine here! Don't worry about me!"

He felt bad about being so petty as soon as they were gone, but damn it, he _was_ petty, and selfish, and a whole lot of other things along those lines. One semi-accidental act of heroism and what amounted to a sudden terminal illness didn't change that. And anyway, Daniel flying across the country just to rubberneck at his unpleasant death was the real asshole move.

He crumpled up the sheet of paper in his hand into a ball and threw it across the room. He and Peggy had been charting out his department's various duties, skirting around the issue of actually assigning them to anyone ... yet.

Jack sighed, splashed some more Scotch into his glass, and flopped back on the couch. He hadn't been kidding about spending his last days as drunk as possible.

A few minutes ticked by and he began to relax. It was somehow easier without Peggy there. He'd known her long enough by now that a lot of the time, being around her was not unlike being alone -- which, okay, sounded pretty uncomplimentary when he put it to himself like that, but the point was, they could just do their thing quietly in the same room and not really notice each other much.

Or at least that was normally the case. Having her constantly in his space was something new. He wondered if she even realized the extent of her hovering. _He_ hadn't realized it until she was gone.

He let out a long sigh and closed his eyes. Cautiously he took stock of his own physical state. 

He didn't feel like he was dying, although from what he'd been told, that was normal at this point. His hand ached. He was still a little queasy and tired, but nothing worse than he could've blamed on jet lag and adjusting to the drier climate.

It just didn't quite seem _real._ It'd probably start feeling real enough when his skin started peeling off, he thought grimly. For right now, though, he couldn't manage to convince himself that he wasn't going to be on a plane back to New York in a day or two. Back to his real life.

***

Peggy and Daniel came back an hour later, holding hands and looking slightly wind-tousled. At least Jack decided to believe the tousling was due to wind. But he hadn't realized how stressed and miserable Peggy had been looking until seeing her now, with some of that weight lifted from her shoulders.

... okay, fine, Sousa could stay, as a Peggy de-stressing device if nothing else.

"Daniel thinks that our current means of passing the time is somewhat morbid," Peggy said in what Jack recognized as her "obstinately cheerful" voice. Daniel winced. "I must say I agree with him. I suggest a change of activity."

"Such as?" Jack inquired. He had resolved to be a little less of an asshole this time, but they were sure making it hard for him. "Horseshoe throwing? Pleasant walks in the desert, stumbling around in the dark?"

"Poker," Daniel said, dropping a deck of cards with an airline logo on the table.

So they played poker until Peggy started to droop. Neither she nor Jack had slept at all last night. They'd flown in the previous afternoon, landing at the private SHIELD airstrip just in time for Stark's tour and, well, _that_ hadn't gone as anyone had planned, and then the night had been a whirlwind of tests and panic and more tests and more panic.

Performing their semi-annual review of the new SHIELD lab should have been the cushiest of jobs, especially considering who was running it. Howard had promised them a couple of days lounging by the pool with top-shelf booze while he gave them a rundown of the lab's upcoming major projects and the three of them (well, mostly Peggy and Stark) decided which ones should get top priority. Jack hadn't been looking forward to the work part, but hell, a couple of days laying around the pool with his office, paperwork, and most of his duties on the other side of the continent? Sign him up.

He was right about the laying around part, anyway.

"Sorry," Peggy murmured, stifling a yawn behind her hand.

"For God's sake, sleep," Jack said, folding his hand. "I could crash, too. You got luggage around somewhere, Sousa?"

"I already dropped off my luggage in our room," Daniel said, gesturing vaguely at the wall.

Right. Obviously. The Carter-Sousas had a suite next to Jack's. Not that he'd had much reason to remember that Peggy had her own room, since she'd hardly been in it since they got here.

"I'm not that tired," Peggy said, before yawning again.

"Yeah you are." Jack got up and put their glasses in the sink of the suite's small kitchenette. "What are you gonna do, stay up for the next week? Go put her to bed, Sousa."

With that he went into the bathroom and got out his toothbrush, making a show of dismissing them.

He was tired, achingly so, despite not having really done much of anything lately. _Except, oh, saving the lives of everyone in the facility, getting irradiated, the usual. All in a day's work._ What he wasn't, however, was sleepy, to his regret, despite the amount of Scotch he'd put away and zero sleep the night before. Instead he'd gone through being mildly drunk and now he just had a headache.

He stared at himself in the mirror. He looked haggard, but he didn't look like a dying man.

Daniel tapped on the door, which Jack had pushed mostly closed, opening it up again. "Hey -- so -- you're probably right, we should get some sleep, and I'm going to take Peggy next door. Are you, uh ..." He hesitated. Jack busied himself with toothpaste. "... okay?"

"Not really anything anyone can do about it if I'm not," Jack said after a minute.

"We don't want to leave you alone, if you want company."

For God's sake. This is exactly why he didn't want Sousa here. "Go to bed. That's what I'm going to do. Good _night."_

Daniel hesitated, then nodded, and with another hesitation, reached out and clapped Jack on the shoulder before withdrawing.

Jack closed the bathroom door firmly and didn't come out until he was positive they were gone.

He went to pour himself another glass of Scotch, but the bottle was empty. He'd already picked up a full one before he gave it a long look and slowly set it down.

Yeah, he could spend the next week, or the next few days, or however long he had, blackout drunk.

But that'd be a shit way to spend his last few days, wouldn't it?

_I don't want to die,_ he thought, staring at his blurred reflection in the dark window.

He gripped the empty glass with fingers that flexed white, then set it in the sink and left the suite.

The lights were on in Peggy and Daniel's suite next door, but the curtains were drawn, so he couldn't see what they were up to. Not that he really wanted to, given the options. He closed his door quietly and circled around the edge of the pool in the warm darkness. 

Nevada nights made him think of California, years ago. It had the same dry, warm quality, with a hint of crispness underneath, very different from New York's moist, garbage-scented summer nights. Around him, the lights of the facility gleamed clear and sharp through the dark; the pool glittered with a reflection of the main lab.

The glassed-in front door of the lab opened easily at his touch. SHIELD didn't have a lot of internal security, as yet, especially not at a secluded facility like this one; the general idea was that you couldn't even get here if you weren't supposed to be here, so there was no need to waste resources restricting people from wandering around the facility at will. 

_Considering what happened to me, I wonder if we should think about changing that,_ Jack thought grimly.

No, he had to correct himself: _they._ No longer _we._ Those decisions would be made by Peggy and Daniel and her other advisors and regional coordinators after his death. He had only a week or two left to live.

It was just so goddamn hard to keep reminding himself of that, especially when he didn't feel that bad. A little tired, a little run down. Headachy from the Scotch. And his hand hurt. But he'd felt worse coming off a two-day work stint with no sleep.

Almost without his conscious control, drawn like a moth to a flame, his feet retraced the complicated path through the lab complex to the hangar where he'd died. ( _Nearly died,_ his brain tried to fill in. But that wasn't accurate. If the lab boys could be believed, he was a dead man walking now; the bullet had hit him yesterday except his body wouldn't catch up to its new reality for a week or so.) He had to retrace his steps a couple of times when he took a wrong turn, but he actually _had_ been paying attention during Stark's orientation tour earlier, and found the hangar without having to ask anybody for directions.

There was red warning tape across the door, and a sign warning of radiation contamination, but when Jack tried the door, it opened. That whole no-locked-doors thing again. The techs probably needed to get in and out to take samples or whatever. Anyway, it wasn't like extra radiation could hurt him now.

Most of the lights were off, except down at the far end. Jack made his way past the shadowed hulks of half-built airplane parts. If they ever did finish building this thing, it was gonna be huge. Flying aircraft carrier -- they weren't kidding about that.

His steps slowed as he approached the end of the hangar where the prototype nuclear engine rested in its cradle. It couldn't hurt him now. Couldn't do a damn thing to him. Heck, if it went critical and nuked the whole facility, all it'd do was hasten things along by a week ... for him, at least.

There was a figure silhouetted against the handful of lights. It seemed that in a facility full of reckless scientific thrill seekers, he wasn't the only person dumb enough to come down here. Stark, he thought at first, or one of the other scientists, until he got close enough to notice the crutch.

"What the hell, Sousa?"

Daniel jumped violently. "Jeez, Jack. Give a guy a heart attack, why don't you --"

"You really want little mutant Carter-Sousa babies that bad, huh?" Jack snapped. Daniel looked at him in a sort of mild surprise when Jack grabbed his arm and manhandled him back a few yards from the engine, before jerking his arm free.

"It's not _that_ radioactive, at least not according to Stark. The signs are just a basic safety measure."

"Which you're ignoring," Jack growled. It pissed him off that he'd literally _died_ here yesterday and Sousa couldn't even be bothered to stay away from the godforsaken thing. "Thought you were with Carter, anyway. She know you're off playing tourist?"

Daniel smiled faintly. "She was out as soon as her head hit the pillow. Me ... I napped on the flight and now I'm too wound up to sleep." He looked back at the nuclear engine. "I wanted to see it. I guess I wanted to ... I don't know, to understand."

Some of Jack's anger seeped away. He got that. At least, he got it from a Daniel sort of perspective. Daniel had always felt better about things if he could understand the underlying logic to them. And now he was looking at that loathsome thing like it was a puzzle to be solved.

"So tell me what I'm looking at, Jack."

"Howard Stark's latest idiot idea," Jack said, and Daniel laughed in a startled kind of way, which made Jack smile along with him, almost against his will.

He and Daniel had never quite managed to be friends, not like he and Peggy were. (At least, he didn't think considering Peggy a friend at this point was unreasonable. She might have other opinions.) He and Daniel had never quite managed to get past the ... well ... there were a lot of things they'd never gotten past. Still, Daniel was _here,_ in the middle of the Nevada desert, and this empty, echoing hangar full of the subtle whiff of death was somehow less terrifying for not being in here alone.

"No really, I'm serious," Daniel said.

"You realize I'm not a scientist, right?"

"I know. But you at least got the tour. I haven't even got a clue what all of this is."

"Like I do," Jack muttered, and pointed to the main engine assembly. "Okay, so, that big steel tube in the cradle there, that's the actual engine. It's some kind of reactor, I guess." From the outside, it didn't look that different from one of those new jet engines that were starting to show up on transcontinental flights. About the same size, too. "Rods of radioactive whatever -- uh --" He had to turn around to locate them. When he'd been here before, the rack containing the rods had been inserted into the steel-tube engine casing, where a StarkTech gadget assembly had automatically lowered it into the reactor at the (accidental) push of a button. Now the rack was just visible at the top of a dull, dark metal case that he guessed was lead; the rods must be inside. "... are over there. From what little of it I actually get, if the rods touch the other half of the thing, the inside half, then a chain reaction starts, and a minute or two later, boom."

"And that's what happened, right?" Daniel said thoughtfully, looking at the lead box. "Minus the boom part, because you pulled them out. What was _that_ like?"

"Hot. Tingled a little. There was a glow."

"A glow, really?"

"Yeah, like a blue glow. Kind of purply blue, hard to look at. Stopped when I yanked the rods off." Jack flexed his fingers. Tried not to think about the pictures he'd seen, how Daghlian's hand -- the one _he_ had used to grab the radioactive material -- had started out mildly burnt and then swollen and sloughed the skin until it hardly looked human anymore; tried not to think about how the underlying flesh was already dead, except his body hadn't figured it out yet.

"God, Jack," Daniel whispered, and Jack looked up sharply, because _fuck you, Daniel, you weren't even here for it._

"What, did you think I wasn't capable of that kind of thing?" he demanded, and maybe there was more of the alcohol still running in his veins than he'd thought, tamping down the part of himself that was always, _always_ in control. "Think I didn't have it in me? The god damn hero of Okinawa --"

\-- and he stopped, made himself stop, because in that moment of disorientation, he'd actually forgotten, straight-up forgotten, that Daniel didn't know what had really happened on the night he'd won the Navy Cross.

Daniel didn't know.

Daniel, who was looking at him with an oddly gentle expression. "When did you last sleep, anyway?"

"I don't sleep anymore, it's a little-known radiation poisoning symptom."

"Right. Let's take a walk."

Jack allowed himself to be herded out of the hangar, Daniel shutting off the lights as they left. Jack looked back once, trying to decide if anything was still glowing back there, or if it was just an illusion conjured by his tired brain.

***

Jack wasn't expecting Daniel to follow him back into his temporary quarters, let alone stick around to pour him a glass of water and rustle him up a sandwich from somewhere.

"Guess I would've tried out this whole dying thing earlier if I realized it'd get me waited on hand and foot. Say, if I asked for a cute blonde, think you could find one for me?"

"We're in a Stark facility. I'd say the odds are pretty good there's at least one around." Daniel picked up a bottle of bourbon off the sideboard, twirled it around, then put it back and poured himself a glass of water as well. 

Jack gazed at the wall and contemplated the fact that he might actually have underestimated his own level of drunkness. The whole damn Navy Cross story seemed to be pressing against the backs of his teeth, wanting to be told, just the same as with Peggy that one day on the plane. Why not? He was going to die anyway. Maybe it was possible to disgust Daniel enough that he'd leave before things got _genuinely_ disgusting.

"So, hey," he began. "You wanna hear a story? I've been waiting awhile to tell you this one."

Daniel caught his wrist, making him jump. "Jack. Whatever you're gonna say, would you have said it if you didn't think you were going to die?"

"I don't _think_ I'm going to -- you know, a whole lot of really smart people, smarter than you, smarter than me, have told me I'm definitely gonna die, so let's stop dancing around it."

"Peggy believes they're going to find a cure." Daniel let him go and sat down across from him, laying the crutch aside.

"Yeah, well, that's Peggy being Peggy. You know she can't stand to admit defeat." Jack reached out to tap one of the file folders on the coffee table. "These things say she's wrong. Stark and Wilkes can't come up with a solution in two or three days for something doctors and scientists around the world have been trying to figure out for years. They can't fix me in a week, Sousa, and that's all the time I have, you got that?" And for most of that week he was probably going to be beyond all help, but he didn't quite want to speak it out loud.

Daniel hesitated, then reached for the file folder. Jack smacked his own hand on top of it, spreading out his fingers and holding it down.

"Trust me. You don't want to look at that."

Daniel tugged on the edge of it, and returned Jack's glare with one of his own. "Yeah I do."

Jack gritted his teeth and relinquished the folder, because the alternative was having a tug-of-war over it. _Just leave,_ he wanted to say. _I don't know why you came here, you asshole. I don't know why you have to know exactly what painful, degrading things are going to happen to me in the next week. I don't know why you can't leave well enough ALONE._

"Anyway," Daniel said, as he flipped it open, "the point is, I don't think you should say anything to me that you wouldn't say if you thought you had forty or fifty years ahead of you, just to be on the safe side."

Jack swung his legs up onto the couch, stretching out, and glared at him. "How are you going to stop me?"

"Go to bed with my wife, probably," Daniel answered promptly, looking at each page in the folder before flipping to a new one.

"I really want to say this. I _need_ to say this."

"Why?" Daniel asked softly, looking up from the folder.

"... what?"

"Why do you need to tell me?" Daniel closed the folder and lay down on the couch opposite Jack, his head propped in one hand.

That ... was actually an unexpectedly difficult question to answer.

_Because if I tell you this, you'll hate me and go away and leave me the fuck alone_ was an answer that seemed unlikely to get the desired results, i.e. Daniel actually listening to him.

_Because you're the only person other than Peggy that I actually ever thought I might be able to tell it to._

_Because --_

"Because I don't want to die knowing I lied to you," he said, and saw Daniel's face change, the soft startled look spreading across it, and wished he'd gone with a harsher truth, but it was too late now.

"Okay," Daniel said quietly. "Go ahead. I'm listening."

"Well, I can't tell you now, you've made it weird," Jack said, rolling onto his back and staring up at the ceiling.

He heard Daniel choke on a laugh. "You jerk, I thought you were --"

"I accidentally killed six guys who came into my camp to surrender," Jack said, plunging over that precipice in the reckless knowledge that it didn't matter anyway.

A soft inhalation, then, "Okay."

"No one knew," Jack said, looking up at the ceiling. " _I_ didn't know. Didn't see ... they were carrying a white flag. All I saw was -- Japanese soldiers, coming into the camp to kill us. Everybody was asleep except me. I'd fallen asleep on the night watch, just woke up, still half asleep after months of never getting enough, you know how it is -- anyway. Killed 'em all. Then -- _then_ I saw that damn flag. And I ..." He had to stop, because up to this point, this was the part any other soldier could relate to. They all knew how easily mistakes were made. He pushed himself onward by reminding himself that it didn't matter; in a week, probably a whole lot less than that, he'd never have to talk to Daniel again. "So I buried the white flag, and the story I told everyone was the first half of what I just told you, well, the thoroughly edited and expurgated version, and definitely never the second half. You want to know how to be a hero, Sousa? Now you know. Kill some people, bury the inconvenient parts of the truth, let them pin a medal on you."

There was a long enough silence from the opposite couch that he could almost -- _almost_ \-- hope Daniel had decided to pretend he'd never heard any of that, and then finally, a soft, "That's the only way, huh?"

"Pretty much. I know what _my_ Navy Cross is worth. Ain't even worth the metal you'd melt it down for. Dunno if every medal anyone ever got in that mess of a war was pot metal under the silver veneer, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's a story like that under most of 'em."

"So you don't think real heroism is a thing?" Daniel asked quietly, and Jack risked a glance over to see that he still had his head propped in his hand, was still looking at Jack.

"Well, hell, I stuck my hand in a nuclear reactor, right?"

"So I hear," Daniel murmured. "For the medals? Something to hang beside the Navy Cross?"

"Oh, fuck you," Jack said, turning his attention back to the ceiling. "Everything Stark's working on here is classified, so it's not like anyone's gonna find out about it. Anyway, medals aren't worth a damn if you aren't around to collect them, which I _wish_ they'd told me a whole lot of years ago." _And a lot of other kids, come to that._

"Peggy knows?"

Jack laughed quietly at the ceiling. "Yeah, Peggy friggin' knows. Doesn't she know everything?"

"How long has she known?"

At least the truth here was fairly simple. "Since Belarus, back in '46."

"Oh," Daniel said softly, a whole world of comprehension in that quiet sound.

"Mmm-hmm." So. Worst was over. He'd said the words. Peggy had listened and looked at him with no hatred in her eyes and he still didn't even know how to handle that, but he _really_ didn't want to see how Daniel was looking at him.

He shut his eyes. Daniel didn't say anything else. There was a soft rustle as Daniel got up off the couch, and Jack wasn't sure where he went, because sleep somehow came down like a dark curtain after all.

***

Jack woke up sprawled on the couch with a crick in his neck. Sousa was gone, but before he could enjoy the solitude too much, the medical staff invaded his room and shanghai'd him off to the all too familiar exam room to examine him some more. It turned out that Peggy and Stark, between them, had had some more doctors flown in, including some of the ones who had treated Daghlian and Slotin. Yay.

"Your white blood cell counts are anomalously high," the head of the medical team informed him.

"Compared to what?" Jack asked waspishly, putting his shirt back on.

"Compared to someone who's taken a dose of ionizing radiation as potent as you have. At this point, your immune system should be starting to collapse and your white blood cell count will crash."

"Should be?" Peggy asked, arriving just then with Daniel in tow, because God forbid Jack should have any privacy. He couldn't quite meet Daniel's eyes. Luckily Daniel didn't seem to be interested in opening up any awkward conversations from the night before, _thank God._ It was bad enough that Peggy had decided to drag Daniel around to all of the embarrassing medical stuff that she'd also annoyingly invited _herself_ along for.

There were still a few go-arounds to endure on the white blood cell count, and more blood drawn, and then the docs unbandaged his hand so they could examine and (with his permission, which he gave because why the hell not) take pictures of the burns. Thankfully it hadn't started to look like the radiation burns in the files he'd been looking at, with their sloughing, blistering skin. It just looked pink and unhappy, and they left it unwrapped so it could get some air. Peggy and Daniel had discreetly retired from the room for this part, apparently getting the hints that Jack was glaring in their direction, but he almost wished they were back so Peggy could come up with an excuse to drag him off somewhere. He was starting to think he was going to starve to death in this room before the radiation could get him (his appetite was back, apparently). However, he finally escaped from the doctors' clutches and Peggy swept them all off to breakfast.

"This is weird," Daniel said as they collected plates for Stark's all-morning staff breakfast buffet. "I mean ... good weird. Very good weird. But ... I read those files last night, Jack ..."

"Amazed you have any appetite at all," Jack snapped, loading his plate. "I told you not to."

Daniel looked up from adeptly navigating the buffet one-handed, setting the plate down to add items to it, then picking it up to move it to a new section of the white-clothed tables. "Yeah, but the docs are right. According to everything that's in those files, you should be going downhill faster than you are. Uh, if you don't mind my saying so."

"Don't sound so disappointed. You gunning for my job already?"

Gallows humor was the only kind he currently had.

But he _did_ feel okay, and he went on feeling okay, and by evening he was getting antsy enough about being kept indoors that he talked Peggy into going for a walk in the desert -- managing to leave Daniel behind. Daniel, who was being inexplicably weird, not hateful and not normal and just kind of _soft_ in Jack's general direction ... and ... fuck him anyway, because thankfully none of this would be Jack's problem in a few days.

He and Peggy climbed a winding trail between dun-colored rocks and cactus, while below them, the sprawling, glass-and-concrete buildings of Stark's facility spread out golden in the evening sun. Jack could even glimpse the glimmer of the pool from up here.

"Sorry I've been a jerk," Jack said at last, quietly. He'd have thought that if anyone was going to instigate an unwanted heart-to-heart, it would have been one of the other two, but no, here he was. With both of them, apparently. Stupid terminal illness.

"And in other news of the obvious, the sun rises in the east." Peggy smiled, sad but sincere, to take out the sting, and she said more gently, "If anyone has a right to a little self-indulgent temper of late, it's you."

"I know, but I hate that it's my go-to method for coping with this kind of situation. You two don't deserve to take the brunt of it." He smiled briefly. "Stark, on the other hand ..."

"Luckily Howard has the skin of a rhinoceros. By all means, feel free."

"Mmmm." He looked toward the setting sun, and added, "I told Daniel about the, ah. About Okinawa."

"I know," Peggy said quietly. "He talked to me about it."

"Oh, _good,"_ Jack snapped out, staring into the sun because it gave him something to look at, and it hurt his eyes and so anything that happened, tear-duct-related, was entirely down to the sun and nothing else. "I might've known keeping it to himself was too much to hope for."

"He knew I already knew. It's not as if he's going to share it with the world. Jack ... I'm glad you decided to trust him."

"Well, I'm dying," Jack told the horizon rather than her. "No reason not to. It's not like it matters what he thinks of me."

"I think it matters to you very much, and that's why you told him."

"Oh yes, because dying while being hated is a vast improvement over just plain dying."

"He doesn't hate you," Peggy said.

"He's not willing to tell me he hates me while I'm dying," Jack corrected. "There's a difference -- ow!"

She'd punched him in the arm.

"Do please remember that Daniel is my husband and deserving of your respect," Peggy said, withdrawing her fist.

"Isn't bruising easily supposed to be a symptom of my condition? I blame you for any arm-related hemorrhages that I suffer from here on out."

"Jack," Peggy said quietly, and she sat down on the nearest boulder and buried her face in her hands.

This was so completely not the reaction he was expecting that all he could do was sit down on the boulder next to her and stare at her in dismay. "Peggy, I was joking about the hemorrhage -- well, mostly --"

"I _know!"_ Peggy snapped, her face still buried in her hands, fingers curled into her hair. "I know -- I, it's only, Jack, please forgive me."

"Forgive you for what --" he began, but then she leaned over and put her arms around him and pressed her face into his chest. 

They'd never hugged before. Never come close to it, really. It was not the sort of relationship they had. But now he had an armful of Peggy, and more or less a lapful of Peggy, that he didn't quite know what to do with.

"... stop?" he tried faintly, patting her on the back.

She didn't answer, just fisted her hands in the back of his shirt and held on tighter.

And he didn't know what else to do, except to lay his cheek against her hair and press his hands against her back (one curled into a loose fist to protect the healing palm), feeling her ribs flex as she took deep breaths, in and out. He didn't think she was crying; at least, he didn't feel any damp patches on his shirt.

The sun slipped below the rim of the world with the desert suddenness he was still getting used to, and a chill settled on them.

"Jack," Peggy murmured into his shoulder.

"Peggy."

"Promise me ..." she murmured. "Promise me you'll try. Promise me you won't give up. Promise me if Howard and Jason and the rest of them come up with solutions, that you'll try them, that you'll try to live, that you _want_ to live."

"I don't goddamn want to die like that, you better believe me."

"Good enough," she sighed, and pushed away from him. She bowed her head and took a few deep breaths with her hands still clutched on his shoulders, then composed herself next to him on the boulder and blew her nose.

"We'd better get moving or we're gonna be stumbling down this hill in the dark," Jack pointed out. "Not that falling and breaking my neck would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to me right now."

Peggy took a shaky breath. "Oh, more likely you'd break both arms and your jaw, and have to be fed through a straw."

"Thanks for reminding me it could always be worse." But he could feel himself starting to smile.

They walked back down to the glittering lights of the lab complex in the gathering dark. Halfway down, where the path widened and it was possible to walk two abreast, Peggy hooked her arm through Jack's, and he let her.

***

By morning things were starting to feel almost ... routine. Jack had breakfast with Peggy and Daniel, and submitted to another round of tests, checking the radioactivity of every part of his body. Still measurably elevated, the docs told him, but slowly creeping back towards background levels. He didn't have any fillings in his teeth, which was good; anything inorganic like that would've held the radiation much longer. (He'd had to discard his watch and the clothes he'd been wearing after his initial radiation exposure.) At least this time he got privacy for a change; Peggy and Daniel were off bothering Stark about the lab's progress on finding a cure.

"Huh," the head doctor remarked, studying his lab results.

"What does that mean?" Jack demanded, the pit of his stomach sinking precipitously. "Is that a good 'huh' or a bad 'huh'?"

"It means," the doctor said slowly, eyes on the paperwork as he scanned the pages, "that your white blood cell counts have almost rebounded to normal, and we have no idea why."

"So that's ... good?" Jack ventured.

"Well, obviously it's good for you in the short term. Possibly doses of radiation at the level that you received have a different response curve in the body than in the cases we've already studied. We have so little data."

"English, Doc."

"You may feel better for longer, and then crash harder." While Jack tried to figure out how to internalize this, the doctor looked up with a frown. "Or there may be additional factors we haven't taken into account yet. I need to consult with Mr. Stark. Er, and I'll need some more blood."

After enduring yet more sample-taking, Jack located Peggy and Daniel down by the pool -- not actually in it, and just wearing their regular clothes, but sitting beside it and talking quietly. Daniel looked up and flashed him a quick smile, so Jack decided to sit on the other side, next to Peggy. In his present state of mind, he couldn't deal with Daniel being friendly at him.

"What did the doctors say?" Peggy asked.

"That I'm doing better than expected for now, but what else is new, and there's every likelihood I'm going to go into total system collapse at any moment. Or possibly they have no idea what's going to happen. So that's fun."

"You do actually look better than you did when I got here," Daniel said. "You've got more color."

"Thank you for your professional opinion, Doctor Sousa." Jack heard the nastiness in his tone only after the words were out and it was too late to do anything about them, as per fucking usual.

Daniel gave a small sigh and struggled to his feet. "I'm gonna call New York and check in with SHIELD, put out any fires that need putting out."

Peggy reached up to take Daniel's hand briefly; their fingers trailed through each other's as Daniel turned away.

"Don't start on me," Jack said wearily as soon as Daniel was out of earshot.

"Jack, what goes on between you and Daniel is not my business. Anyway --"

"Since when has that tiny problem ever stopped you?"

" _\-- anyway,"_ she went on, with a slight frown, "I think you underestimate how much of what you're currently going through that Daniel can relate to."

"Oh, he's been lethally poisoned and given a week to live, too? Small world."

"You know what I'm saying. I don't think I need to spell it out."

Jack sighed. "Yeah. I know what you're saying. I also love how you're staying out of it."

Her annoyed frown deepened, and she reached for the briefcase behind her, safely out of pool-splashing range, because of course Peggy thought of things like that even when nobody was wearing a bathing suit and likely to dive in. (And then typically failed to think of things like, oh, say, _calling backup_.) "I suggest we get some work done, since you appear to be at loose ends."

"If nothing else," Jack said as she opened the briefcase and pulled out their scribbled notes on Jack's office's structure, "at least SHIELD will be organized more efficiently after all of this."

***

The day slipped away in paperwork and lunch and more damn tests, and by evening Jack was starting to feel restless and trapped. The lethargy and exhaustion that had plagued him since his radiation exposure had given way to tense, energetic nervousness. He _would_ say he was feeling better, except that every single piece of paper in all those stupid files on Slotin and Daghlian told him that this was a temporary reprieve, his body playing one final trick on him before things got deeply, horrifically unpleasant.

It was giving him the same feeling as being back in the damn jungle on Okinawa, knowing death could come for him at any time, from any direction. 

There had been, Jack recalled, two basic kinds of guys he'd served with. There were the ones who really wanted to live, who were terrified of death and turned into nervous wrecks waiting for the bullet with their name on it, who broke their hearts over their buddies who died. And there were the ones who learned not to give a damn, just stopped thinking about the future, stopped caring about the guys who didn't make it, and let the whole thing roll over them. It was the only practical way to handle it, really. Why tear yourself up waiting for a future that wasn't going to happen?

When it came down to it, Peggy might treat hope like she thought it was some kind of armor, but hope did fuck-all to stop a bullet.

His hands were shaking again. He reached for the whiskey bottle. After temporarily abandoning his "spending his last days blind drunk" plan, he had decided to resume in the hopes it'd calm his nerves down some. So far, half a bottle of bourbon didn't seem to have done anything except make him even more wound up by knocking down some of the self-control that was keeping him steady.

It didn't help that Stark had called Peggy over to the lab to talk to her. Just Peggy. Which probably meant the subject was Jack and his ever-more-impending demise.

He almost wished death would hurry up and get it over with.

"Gin," Daniel said, laying his cards down. "And that makes the third game in a row that I've won. Come on, if you're letting me win, could you at least try to be less obvious about it?"

"I hate to see a grown man cry," Jack snarked back automatically, setting the drink aside with marginally steadier hands and gathering the cards to deal them. 

They were in Jack's suite, surrounded by papers, the leftovers of their SHIELD work mixed with the Daghlian and Slotin files, and other, even more deeply classified files from further afield: Hiroshima, mostly, as well as some Soviet and German experiments. Peggy had been having everything brought in that she could get her hands on, with copies for the lab and medical staff, and copies for them.

It was as if, Jack thought, she believed she could solve it on her own somehow, with no medical degree, even though every one of those files said it was unsolvable. Peggy Carter didn't believe in puzzles that had no solution.

Peggy ... and Daniel. Because Daniel had been reading those stupid files too, and it was about time Jack manned up and admitted to himself that Daniel wasn't just here because of Peggy.

"You gonna deal those cards or make love to them?" Daniel asked, reaching for his own drink.

Being terminally ill was supposed to make you want to resolve your life's regrets. Jack's regrets were many and legion, but there were only a few he could do something about, and one of them was sitting on the couch across from him, in a goddawful tropical shirt with a bottle of Stark's expensive bourbon in one hand.

"Hey, Sousa," Jack said, and Daniel looked up. "So, I've already apologized to Peggy, but why stop there on the 'round-the-world Thompson apology tour. I'm sorry for being a jackass lately."

"Just lately?" Daniel asked, but his voice was unexpectedly light, and warm humor glimmered in his brown eyes.

"What, you want an apology for every lousy thing I've done to you since we met?"

"Yes," Daniel said solemnly, and then a grin broke through, and he reached across the coffee table to give Jack a playful shove in the arm, making Jack give him a deeply suspicious look. "No. Look, I'm not going to pretend I know what you're going through right now, but you and I both know I've been through my own stuff, and believe me, I was a surly bastard for a lot of it. Anyway, you were actually _way_ more of a jackass after you got shot."

"I was?" Jack said, because his general recollection of that time period was that he'd behaved fairly well. Okay, he'd been a bit testy. Maybe a lot testy. But he didn't really remember doing anything ... okay, he didn't remember doing _that_ much ... that he felt outright guilty about.

Maybe it wasn't that he was more of a jerk this time; it was just that it seemed to matter more.

He didn't want to spend his last days on Earth being a complete ass to two people who'd traveled across the country to stay up 'til all hours playing cards with him and otherwise distracting him while his body disintegrated.

Or ... failed to disintegrate. As it seemed to be doing at the moment, however temporarily.

"For what it's worth," Daniel added, looking away, "I know I haven't said much about the Okinawa thing and I don't know if you're taking that as -- well -- I don't know, as me having a problem with it or whatever. The thing is, I don't really know what to say. I appreciate that you told me. A lot of things about you make more sense now. And ... that's all. A couple of years ago, it might've made a big difference, one way or another. But ..." He shrugged and took the cards as Jack dealt them. "I know you too well now, I guess."

"Written me off as a lost cause?" Jack said, falling back on his default defensive mode, sarcasm.

"Something like that."

The door opened. Peggy came in, trailing the day's lingering desert heat into the air-conditioned suite and looking pensive.

"Let me guess," Jack called. "They've changed my deadline. I'm now due to drop dead next Tuesday on the dot of six p.m."

"You just can't stop joking about it, can you?" Daniel asked, sounding mildly desperate.

"I'll stop joking about it on the day I die. Next Tuesday, from the sound of things; right, Marge?"

"Mmmm." Peggy took Daniel's glass from his hand, took a small gulp, and perched on the arm of the couch he was sitting on. She still looked thoughtful, and Jack knew the other shoe was about to drop.

"Jack, you're still feeling well, I take it?"

"Yes," Jack admitted, "although not for lack of everyone telling me it's a lie and I'm going to die any minute."

"Yes, well, Howard and Jason have a rather unorthodox theory about that." Peggy looked down at the glass in her hand, as if looking for answers in the whiskey. "It is ... _very_ unorthodox. But so are your symptoms, from what I'm told."

"Spit it out. I hope you're about to tell me I've developed superpowers like in those stupid comics half the SHIELD agents seem to be addicted to."

"Not ... precisely," Peggy said, causing Daniel to look up at her, stilling his hand which had been idly rubbing her leg.

"Peggy, for God's sake." Jack's shield of sarcasm, his last defense, fell away; naked sincerity was all he had left. "Whatever it is, no matter how bad it is, just tell me."

"It's not bad, not exactly," Peggy said, and Jack was about to come over there and strangle it out of her when she went on. "Their theory, Jack, is that your -- or, I should say, _our_ Zero Matter exposure several years ago might have influenced our bodies' ability to absorb radiation. All three of us have had very slight anomalies in our bloodwork results for years; Howard calls it Factor X --"

"Wait, we've had what? Since when?" Daniel asked, staring up at her.

"Since Howard and I decided all of SHIELD's high-ranking members needed to have their blood on file. For whatever it's worth, he didn't mention Factor X to me either, until today. He wasn't sure if it was relevant." Annoyance tinged her tone. "In your last round of blood samples, Jack, they were running every test they could think of to try to find Zero Matter in your bloodstream. They couldn't find any, but your test results in all ways appear to have returned to very nearly normal -- your pre-radiation normal, that is -- and there is no way to explain that, I'm told. Scientifically, it shouldn't be possible. It's as if most of the radiation you received -- not precisely _all_ of it, but the vast majority is -- just -- not there. As if something absorbed it. Howard wanted to check and see if I still have trace amounts of his so-called Factor X in my bloodstream, and I still do. So do you, and therefore Daniel too, I presume."

Daniel was very still, frozen actually, looking up at Peggy. Jack could hear his own heartbeat in his ears.

"Zero Matter," he said, zeroing in on the one part of the conversation that made even a little bit of sense. "That was six years ago. Are you saying that stuff's still in me? That it was _ever_ in me? I wasn't contaminated, not like Wilkes."

"No, but we were there," Peggy said. "That night when the, er -- the explosion happened, when Jason lost his ability to contain it. It was everywhere."

"I didn't touch it," Jack said. "None of us did." He looked at Daniel, hoping for support, but Daniel still looked stunned.

"I'm not aware that any of us did, but we don't know how it works. It could have been in the air. We could have received a dose in the initial shock wave. Howard's not sure."

"So what does all of this _mean?"_ Jack demanded.

"It means you're going to live, Jack," Daniel said, breaking into a sudden grin.

Jack stared at him -- at them, because Peggy was tentatively smiling now, too.

"That's impossible," he said flatly.

"Impossible," Peggy said, "is Howard's stock in trade."

"Yeah, but you don't _know._ They don't know! They have no right -- to --" He slapped his hand across the coffee table, scattering cards and nearly knocking his drink off the edge.

"Jack --" Peggy began.

"No, you don't get it, you --" He snapped off the sentence, stood up abruptly, and then didn't know what to do with himself. He wanted to run. He wanted to punch something, possibly Stark. "This doesn't make any difference, don't you see that? Or -- no -- it's _worse,_ it's actually worse!"

Daniel was standing now too, and he looked angry, as if _he_ had something to be angry about. "How in the hell is it worse than an automatic death sentence, Jack?"

"Because we don't _know!"_ Jack snarled at him. "It's all the uncertainty we had before, except now they're dangling _hope_ in front of me, and -- trust me, it's worse! I'd about got my head wrapped around the -- the other thing, and it wasn't _easy_ , but I was dealing with it, just about --"

"No you weren't!" Daniel shot back at him, shocking Jack halfway out of his own anger; Daniel had never really yelled at him before. "No you _weren't,_ you were an absolute wreck, you don't know how scared Peggy and I were that you were going to -- that you --" He caught his breath, as Peggy put a quelling hand on his arm, and went on in a slightly more moderate tone. "Resignation isn't acceptance and you know it, and anyway, why is it that you can take a death sentence at face value, but have to come up with some reason to explain away every single thing that suggests you're _not_ actually going to die --"

"Because _it's not real!"_

That shut Daniel up, left him staring at Jack.

"It's not real," Jack told him fiercely, told both of them, trying to convince himself that the hot, prickling feeling behind his eyes wasn't tears he was trying not to shed. "This isn't how life works out. You don't get sudden, last-minute miracles. And even if there was such a thing, you think miracles get wasted on people like _me?"_

Peggy's lips parted and Jack wished he could reel those words back, but at the same time, he was too pissed off to care, not with half a bottle of whiskey fueling his inability to control his mouth.

Anyway, Daniel seemed to be having the same problem. "You threw yourself on a nuclear bomb to save a roomful of people, you asshole! What in the world is it going to take to prove to you that you're a good person?"

"What in the hell is it going to take for _you_ to figure out you can't make the world into something it isn't just by wishing?"

"You think I don't know that?" Daniel snarled, stabbing a finger down at his leg. "You really think I don't know that?"

Now it was Jack's turn to shut up, feeling like he'd been kicked in the stomach. Peggy's fingers closed around Daniel's arm, support or message or warning, it was hard to say. Daniel brushed his hand over hers, and then, carefully but firmly, freed himself and stepped away.

"You're going to live, Jack," Daniel told him. "If you don't believe it, then I'll have to believe enough for both of us." He turned abruptly and left the suite, closing the door behind him in a wash of warm desert night air.

"It's not that I'm trying to prove --" Jack began, his words falling into the echoing silence left in Daniel's wake. Peggy was staring after Daniel, gazing at the closed door. "... It's _not_ that. It's just that the world doesn't work that way. I -- didn't mean to suggest that his -- that he --" He broke off. Where was that damn silver tongue when he needed it? Sometimes it seemed like the only time he couldn't say the right thing was whenever it really mattered.

"I know," Peggy said softly. " _He_ knows. But don't you think ..." She tore her eyes away from the door and looked at him in a way he could hardly bear, soft and warm. "Don't you think there's a good chance Howard could be right? There's no other explanation, nothing anyone has been able to come up with. It's all right to hope. It's all right to believe in ... something."

She was looking at him in that way she'd always had, that somehow made other people want to believe in her (or dragged them kicking and screaming into believing in her, in certain cases). Peggy was a lighthouse; he'd known that for awhile now. As that light raked over the dark reaches of his soul, he retreated from it, knowing even as he did that the person he was really fooling was himself.

He'd lost his taste for whiskey, so he took their glasses into the kitchen. When he turned around, Peggy was still standing where he'd left her, staring at the door.

"Jack ..." she said. "Where did Daniel go?"

"Where'd he go? Who cares? He stomped off to sulk somewhere." Jack winced inwardly; it would be nice if his mouth would consult him about this "being a jerk" thing every once in a while. 

Peggy was long since inured to it, though, and she only shook her head distractedly. "I didn't hear the door of our suite close."

"So he's brooding by the pool. Maybe he'll fall in. Cool his head."

"Maybe." She chewed her lip and then went to the door, opening it to look out into the desert night. Jack stepped up to her shoulder. There was no sign of Daniel in the brightly lit space between the buildings, but movement across the courtyard, on the far side of the pool, caught Jack's eye. The door to the main lab building was just swinging shut.

"Think he went to talk to Stark?"

"I think he had his mind made up about something. I think --" Peggy sucked in her breath so hard she almost choked, and tore away from Jack's side, flying into motion. 

Startled, Jack caught up in time to steer her away from the slippery edge of the pool.

"The reactor." Peggy stumbled to a halt at the lab door, gripped the handle, and pulled. Nothing happened. The door, for the first time since Jack had been at the lab complex, was locked.

"No, no, no," Peggy whispered. "Around -- we can go around -- come on!"

"Why would he want the reactor?" Jack demanded as they raced around the base of the buildings. He couldn't remember the layout of the place in that much detail, but Peggy had been involved with the original planning, putting her head together with Stark's. "He's not _nuts._ He wouldn't blow us up."

"No, he's out to prove a point." Peggy wrenched at the first door she found. It opened under her hand and she breathed a soft prayer as they ran into the bottom of a stairwell.

"A point about what?"

"Jack! Stop being obtuse for a moment and just _think!_ Does he know how to use it?" She threw open the door to a long hallway that looked vaguely familiar.

"Yes," Jack said heavily. "I told him how. But, look, I don't think even Sousa's bullheaded enough to start a nuclear chain reaction just to win an argument --"

"And if you really think that's why he's doing it, then I don't know how to convince you --" She nearly ran into the door to the hangar. It was locked, too. "Daniel!" Peggy shouted, slapping her palm against the door. She cupped her hands around her face and peered through the tiny window in the door, then yanked on the handle again.

Jack tried kicking it in, an effort which did absolutely nothing. They might not make a habit of locking the doors around here, but they'd clearly designed the facility with security in mind.

"Daniel! Open this damned door right now!"

"If he does this, he's going to die," Jack protested. "So then there'll be two of us dying. What kind of sense does that make?"

"He'll only die if _you_ do!" Peggy all but shouted at him, and that was the point when the pieces fell into place, and also when blue-violet light flashed within.

***

"I am married," Peggy declared, pacing around the exam room in the medical center and dodging doctors as they swirled around Daniel, laid out on a bed, "to a bloody _idiot."_

"Peg, I'm fine," Daniel protested. He flexed his hand. "It just tingles a little."

He was propped up on one elbow, wearing a set of scrubs, his hair wet from a hasty shower to wash as much radiation from his skin as possible. His crutch had been confiscated due to the fact that it was now radioactive.

"Yes, and did you read _any_ of those files back in our room?" Peggy's hands had started to clench into fists; she straightened them out with a visible effort. "That's exactly how Dr. Daghlian described his initial symptoms after _he_ held supercritical nuclear material in his bare hands. Before his skin fell off. Not to mention that you could have blown all of us up."

"Not with a quick contact between the rods and the core, just enough to let it go supercritical for an instant. I _did_ read the files, Peg."

Peggy must be just about wound up tight as a ball of knotted rope if she was being that blunt. Jack kinda got where she was coming from, though. He kept staring at Daniel; he couldn't help it. Okay, yeah, Jack had pulled a handful of rods out of the thing, which was pretty stupid, but the alternative had been having the entire hangar go up in a radioactive fireball. He wasn't stupid enough to hold one of those rods in his bare hand and stick it _into_ the thing, on purpose.

Except perhaps "stupid" wasn't quite the word he wanted.

Trust Daniel Sousa to find a way to upstage him in the hero department when Jack had literally stuck his hand into a runaway nuclear reaction to save everyone from being blown up. Life was so unfair.

Daniel still looked pale and sick to his stomach, but according to the doctors, he was having the same anomalous reaction as Jack: based on the radiation dosage, he should've spent the next few hours violently ill, but he'd gotten off with relatively short-lived nausea, which seemed to indicate that his body was throwing it off the same way Jack's had. When they had finally managed to break into the hangar, he was bent over beside the reactor, throwing up. He'd gotten over it in a few minutes, though, and his hand wasn't even blistered, the lucky bastard.

The door slammed open and Howard Stark strode in, lab coat flaring out behind him. "Okay, who in this room nearly blew us all up _again?_ I can't believe it's happened twice in the last three days and it wasn't me either time."

Jack pointed at Daniel. Stark looked startled.

"Really? I thought you were the sensible one."

Peggy caught his arm. "Howard, we think you might be right, that it's the Zero Matter exposure preventing Jack's symptoms from developing." Her face was desperately hopeful -- as well she might be, Jack thought, since her husband was now one of the people whose head was on the chopping block if Stark was wrong. Jack gave Daniel another long, disbelieving look; Daniel avoided his eyes, as he'd been doing ever since they'd all been hustled off into a clean room in the medical wing.

Stark, meanwhile, had lit up like a hound on the trail of a scent. "I'm right! I'm right, aren't I? You're radiation-proof! All of you are. Ha! I knew it."

Peggy took a deep, gasping breath and punched him in the arm, producing a wounded yelp. "No you didn't. You've been telling Jack he's going to die for the last three days!"

"In my defense," Stark said, rubbing his arm, "people exposed to a lethal dose of radiation _usually_ die, one might even say invariably. I forgot the rules are different when applied to you, Peg."

"So ... just to get things clear, here," Jack said cautiously. A strange feeling unfolded in his chest. It might be hope. "The general consensus here is that I'm probably going to live, right?"

Daniel groaned and flopped his head back on his pillows. "Peggy, please hit Jack for me."

"I shall do nothing at all for a man who put his arm in a nuclear reactor and turned it on."

"Only to prove a point!" Daniel said, and then frowned, as if realizing that wasn't as good an argument as it had sounded in his head.

"Yes, you're going to live," Howard said, before frowning and adding a qualifying, "Probably." He glanced quickly at Peggy. "Peg, if you're entertaining any ideas about going for a trifecta, let me know so I can beef up security on the reactor."

"First of all, I hope you know that wouldn't stop me," Peggy said, "and second, I am apparently the only person in this room who isn't foolish enough to handle nuclear material with my bare hands."

"No, you just steal it," Jack said defensively.

"Only with proper safety precautions!"

Daniel coughed pointedly. Peggy ignored him and turned her back on both of them, but Jack caught the edge of a smile. 

He sat down on the edge of Daniel's hospital bed, fighting down a small grin himself. God, he'd missed the way they could all bounce off each other that way; he hadn't realized how brittle everything had been, the last few days.

"How you feelin'?" he asked Daniel. "Like hell, right?"

"Pretty much," Daniel grumbled.

"Nausea?" Jack said. "Tired as heck? Headache? Hand hurts?"

"Most of those, yeah."

"Good news is, it goes away in a couple of days." Assuming things progressed for Daniel as they had for Jack -- barring the horrifying possibility that Daniel hadn't picked up whatever radiation immunity Jack apparently had, and would therefore suffer the radiation dose he'd taken in full. But so far there was every indication that they both had it.

"That's the good news, is it?"

"No, you're right." And he tried to push away all the lingering doubts crowding his brain -- that Stark was wrong about the Zero Matter, that Daniel hadn't received the same immunity, that Peggy and Daniel would eventually get sick of putting up with him, or that their friendship had never been more than a sham in the first place ... Because the problem was, believing that _he_ was still going to die also meant the same fate for Daniel, and when it came right down to it, he could deal (barely) with the idea of going through that kind of nightmare death himself, but the idea that Daniel only had a week to live was too much to take. Daniel's plan, as it turned out, was even more diabolical than he'd realized. "No, the good news is, we're going to live."

***

_So, sometimes being a fake hero gets you a Navy Cross and being a real hero gives you shit. That's life._

_And sometimes, just sometimes, if you're lucky, you find yourself with people in your life who are willing to expose themselves to a lethal dose of radiation just to prove to you that you're not going to die._

_The world ain't fair, but sometimes it gives away a miracle or two, after all._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my betas for your very helpful comments! All remaining fail, scientific and otherwise, is mine alone.


End file.
